The Or Foundation And Tide Turners Community Cooperative Celebrate Two Million Kilograms Of Waste Removed From Accra’s Beach

Accra-based The Or Foundation invites members of the public to its Constitution Day cleanup in celebration of removing over two million kilograms of textile and other waste from Accra’s beaches since 2024.

The public cleanup on Friday, January 9th is part of an ongoing series of weekly cleanups run as a collaboration between The Or Foundation, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly’s (AMA) Waste Management Department and Tide Turners, a registered community cleanup cooperative emerging from The Or Foundation’s cooperative training program.

Tide Turners consists of 65 paid participants and around 100 regular volunteers, all from the nearby communities surrounding the cleanup site at Kinshasha Beach in Jamestown behind Ussher Fort.

Based on the findings of The Or Foundation’s citizen science ecological monitoring program tracking textile waste along Accra’s coastline every week since 2021, the Jamestown Fishing Harbour beach area is particularly polluted due to its location near the Korle Lagoon where waste dumped along the lagoon is washed ashore through tidal patterns.

By organizing community members as a professional cleanup crew and deploying a truck owned and operated by The Or Foundation under authorisation of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly hauling away over 30tons of waste every week, the multi-year weekly cleanup effort is beginning to transform a beach that was once so heavily polluted sand could hardly be seen. 

With a regular workforce of over 100 community youth, the weekly cleanup exercise is one of the largest beach cleanup efforts in West Africa and provides a potential template for the nationwide cleanup initiative announced by President Mahama in November during the National Fisheries Day.

The Kinshasha Beach location, as it is known by local community members, is home to the Jamestown Fishing community. In addition to supporting the organization of Tide Turners into a community-based cooperative and providing a truck for the cleanup effort, The Or Foundation ecosystem health services team provides on-site first aid and health screenings for regular participants.

The Or Foundation and Tide Turners work together to track the tags of clothing companies found on the beach, linking the cleanup effort back to emerging policy on extended producer responsibility at a global scale. The Or Foundation posts the most frequently found brand tags to the organisation’s social media accounts (@theorispresent) along with a call for those brands, such a Adidas, Nike, Marks & Spencer and H&M who produce new garments that find their way to Ghana’s coastline through the global secondhand trade to cover the costs of ecological remediation. 

• The Constitution Day cleanup will begin at 12:00pm sharp and last for approximately one and a half hours, closing before the tides move in across the beach.

• Participants should expect to get their hands and feet dirty

• Guests are asked to sign in at the information tent staffed by The Or Foundation. 

• Guests should plan to bring refillable water bottles for water dispensers that are provided on-site. 

• Tide Turners members and organizers from The Or Foundation divide into workgroups assigned to different tasks including:

  • digging up heavy ‘textile tentacles’, 

  • documenting the brand tags of retrieved garments

  • sweeping the beach and scooping plastics out of the water. 

Nearly everyone carries bags of collected waste up the access stairs to the truck provided by The Or Foundation where bags are counted and a random selection of bags are weighed before being hauled away.

Although the cleanup effort has achieved a major milestone of removing 2,316,828kg over 93 cleanups since January of 2024, The Or Foundation’s goal is to prevent waste from ever arriving at the beach. In its role as the Textile Value Chain Lead for UNIDO’s Ghana Circular Economy Centre, The Or Foundation has also organised a market-wide waste management cooperative in Kantamanto Market dedicated to gathering textile waste before it enters Accra’s ecosystem, and through the AMA and The Or Foundation, this market-wide cooperative has piloted a sorting centre setup by The Or Foundation to help divert eligible textile waste into value-addition pathways such as upcycled t-shirt yarn and fiberboard panels for sound insulation. A selection of these products are available for order at The Or Foundation’s Other Showroom in Adabraka. 

The Or Foundation (pronounced “or”) is a not-for-profit organization working to catalyse a Justice-led circular economy through community ecological care. Founded in 2011 and based in Accra, Ghana, home to Kantamanto Market — the world’s largest secondhand clothing market and leading hub for reuse, repair, upcycling, and remanufacturing — The Or Foundation has leveraged its insights and firsthand knowledge to identify and implement innovative solutions, advocate for meaningful international policy change and brand accountability, lead science-backed research initiatives, and provide education and programming reaching thousands of people in Ghana and internationally. To learn more visit https://theor.org.

For media queries and more information, please reach out to: kwabena@theor.org